What will happen when highly evolved aliens with super advanced technology find our little planet bulging with life and recourses? The alien invasion scenario has been a popular topic in science fiction since the beginning.
When aliens invade in movies, humans usually win. This is because of stupid aliens. In both War of the worlds Signs the aliens come to earth unprotected and is killed by germs and water. In Independence Day the aliens are smarter and wear a protective bio-suit, but still they are not smart enough to stop humans infiltrating their mother ship and uploading a virus to disable their shields.
How realistic is this scenario? Jeff Goldblum only needs a few hours to understand and create a virus for their software. They than proceed to take a 50 year old alien ship and flies into the mother ship. Does the aliens not have serial numbers on their ships? Do they not wonder why a 50 year old ship is entering the mother ship, do they not wonder why a small fighter class ship is flying into the mother ship, no other fighters come from earth. Do they allow any ship to upload information into the mainframe to be distributed fleet wide? Properly not…
The alien invasion movies of 2011 have shown a more realistic scenario, biomechanical invasion units. In Skyline the aliens collect humans so they can use our brains as computers in different kinds of collecting units, flying, walking and humanoid ones. In World invasion battle Los Angeles the aliens send biomechanical units to defeat our military. There is also a new alien invasion TV series airing right now, Falling skies. Here we see civilians and the remains of military personnel form a resistance and fight back. In the series the aliens use mechs, flying units and (spoiler) genetically altered aliens (soon human kids they harness will also transform) to collect crap metal to build their platform thingy with unknown function. The invading aliens themselves are laid back out of harms way.
It makes sense to use Biomechanical soldiers instead of your own kind. However, an alien race so advanced they can cross the stars would properly have an even better solution. In an article I read, someone said the most likely scenario of a alien invasion movie would be people getting sick, and then everyone dies, the last thing you would see in the movie would be the last person dying looking up at the sky seeing alien spacecrafts landing everywhere. This makes sense, why fight humans when you could simply kill them all with a virus you engineered.
This is my take on a likely scenario for an alien invasion: The aliens send billions of flying Nano-bots into the atmosphere. The Nano-bots infect all humans and concentrate in our brains. The humans can then kill us all of simultaneously or tell us that we are their slaves and must do what they say or else we die, probably demonstrate this by killing all army personnel or something like that. And if the Nano-bots were advanced enough they might just control us directly right away.
Only reason they would come down to fight us, would be if they have lost their planet and have been drifting through space with little recourses, like in the movie Battle for Terra, this is a reversed scenario do, worth checking out.
In conclusion, if aliens come with the intent of taking our planet they will succeed. Whey will not forget to inoculate themselves against human deceases, they will wear protective suits if they melt in contact with water, they will have safeguards in their software to prevent humans made viruses and most importantly they would probably kill or enslave us all without even showing up on earth. To use the words of C-3PO – we are doomed!
There's a lot of assumptions here. If aliens really do have such huge amounts of nano-bots capable of infecting brains and disrupting our bodies chemistry, why would they need our planet. This is my biggest problem with any alien invasion scenario. Why?
ReplyDeleteEver since the first time I saw war of the worlds, I just assumed the aliens were desperate for a new planet to inhabit. Possibly because their old world was destroyed, or they were driven away by some other race, or another faction of their own. Whatever the reason, they seemed to be desperate for some world. Any world that could possibly be terraformed into something resembeling their own. In their hurry to settle somewhere or because they thought they'd be starting the terraforming earlier, they didnt account for the germs, possibly in the same way human rocket scientists got american and english feet mixed up back in the day, thus causing rockets to crash.
The more calculated types probably wouldn't bother even visiting earth, except for archeological purposes. To study us, but otherwise leave us alone. They're smart enough to get what they want without having to cause the downfall of an entire planets ecosystem. If they did desire our planet however, they'd probably have the patience to wait until we killed ourselves, which by now seems like a more or less inevitability.
Keeping humans as slaves also seems like a useless notion, as they would probably have access to machinery with much better precision and strength than ourselves. The last Tranformers-movie made this argument look completely ridiculous. Even a machine-race shouldn't have problems using non-sentinent machines.
The preserver-approach seems to be the most realistic scenario so far, with the day the earth stood still. With a race already so insistant on killing itself, it would make sense to make sure it didn't take the planet with it. This hasn't happened so far though, so I wouldn't be too afraid of this happening.
The last motivation would probably be fanaticism. "We hate everything living" or "We hate everything tiving except for ourselves. In this case though, they'd probably not even bother to invade. They'd just blow the thing up and be done with it. Killing everything on the planet seems too much of a hassle when you can kill the planet itself, and chances are, if you are a race of fanatical beings capable of travelling through solar systems, you will have that option.
So barring hateful fanatics and enviremental preservers, I think we're safe. And should the fanatics invade instead of destroy, chances are that they haven't planned it all to well. It might not seem that way at first, but fanatics of any kind are conceptionally flawed, and their plans usually reflect that. This, incidentally, is also my answer to the Jeff Goldblum-problem.
Do note that all this is off the bat and probably as flawed as a fanatics battleplans, but I'm sure theres a good point or two somewhere.
Cheers.